Sunday, February 29, 2004
(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Hospitality
I've written about this before, and to write about it again might be inhospitable to those who are not directly involved in the situation -- but the dialog listserv at Olivet Nazarene University is being shut down. This is, as Anthony put it in his "parting shot," a "non-event." It is completely expected, indeed inevitable. Beyond that, I personally do not have a great nostalgic attachment to the dialog listserv; I studied in the religion department there for only a short, though formative, time; and I was never deeply involved with the theology club or its activities. This is surely something that must be passed over without comment.
And it will be. There will be no fanfare. There will be no gleeful, triumphant declarations from "on high." There will be no patronizing retrospective in the campus newspaper. There will probably not even be many questions from students, since very few new participants have entered the fold. The conversation will move to other places, perhaps either this page or the CRI Discussion Forum. All of "us" will be able to move on. I wonder, though, what will continue to happen to those new students who continue to arrive at a continually inhospitable campus. I wonder how it will be for those who may never get a chance to question what they came to school already believing. Is education even possible in a situation in which you are expected to maintain the same opinions that you formed in Sunday School, and aside from that to learn marketable skills? Is education even possible in an institution that feels that it is fundamentally threatened by questioning, that has to push questioners onto the margins, exploiting their labor and dedication at the same time as they attempt to "gently" push them out of the institution altogether? Is education possible when the fundamental question of what it means to be human in the light of God's revelation in Christ is taken to be the most straightforward and obvious thing in the world, and where serious intellectual inquiry that seeks understanding--not to overthrow the church or its teachings, not to tear apart the community, but understanding--is discouraged, where even the virtual space where it might, haltingly, continue to take place, is closed?
People don't always choose to go to Olivet. I freely chose it, certainly, but people don't always freely choose. Free choice takes place a lot less often than we like to think. Some people come to Olivet with eating disorders; they hear in chapel that eating disorders are a sin, and maybe that's the last straw, maybe they were just going to go into the counselling center to get some help--but, as sin? Some people come to Olivet with a strong, perhaps unacknowledged, attraction to people of the same sex; they hear in chapel that their disease is a choice and that their disease can be cured. Many of those people came to Olivet eager to serve Christ and the Nazarene Church--many of those people are the most active in promoting Olivet through music and admissions recruitment--but to hear that this principle around which they want to organize their intimate life, the principle according to which they want to determine to whom they will give themselves emotionally and sexually is a disease? There are people who come to school with unresolved heterosexual issues, who are ashamed to have to walk around in a damned body all the time, who wonder if they are even capable of loving another person--and they hear, over and over, that if they so much as watch a movie with nudity in it, they had better take a damn hard look at their motivations and at where they are with Christ.
Certainly none of that is necessarily earth-shattering stuff -- it's survivable. It's nothing worse than what you might find in certain churches, just par for the course. But then there are other things happening, too, spaces that open up where people can become something different, where they can understand themselves and the world differently, in ways that don't make them ashamed and depressed and despairing, but in ways that make them want to love themselves and give themselves to others, to serve, to live fully. Perhaps those things are what we might hope that a Christian college, at its best, would provide -- and many Christian colleges do, to some degree. Olivet still does, to some degree -- you just have to look a little harder, and you just have to unplug yourself from the official self-preservation mechanisms of the institution. Such spaces will continue to exist as long as God hasn't completely abandoned us -- but by shutting down dialog, the administration is saying, finally, that those spaces must fight for their existence, that their existence will be tentatively tolerated in spite of the official stance of the institution.
Maybe that's good of them to finally say that. Maybe it's good of them to be honest and finally say that they're in the self-preservation business and that everyone basically has to fend for herself. Maybe this will create a situation in which real, fundamental change can occur. It doesn't look promising, frankly -- but I hope so, for the sake of the people being put through the wringer of shame and self-hatred every single day.
UPDATE: I have apparently been had by the Olivet Rumor Mill. The sad thing is that this rumor was so instantly believable. In any case, see Jared Sinclair's comment to this thread.
